7 June, 2021
Nandan Nilekani has suggested that India embrace cryptocurrencies as assets amid growing uncertainty around how they should be regulated in the country.
“Just like you have some of your assets in gold or real estate, you can have some of your assets in crypto,” he told the Financial Times in an interview. “I think there’s a role for crypto as a stored value but certainly not in a transactional sense.”
The chair of Infosys, the IT consulting giant, said cryptocurrencies are too volatile and energy intensive to use as a means of payment and thought that India’s own homegrown Unified Payments Interface digital payments infrastructure as more effective.
But he said crypto should be encouraged as an asset to be bought and sold, like a commodity.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Indian central bank, recently overturned the previous banking ban on crypto transactions that some banks are still adhering to purge clients dealing with cryptocurrencies, even though the Supreme Court had sidestepped the banking ban as unconstitutional.
Copyright @ 2021 Financial Times
